As a self-professed child of the counterculture era, Vijay Sheshadri, an American poet of Indian origin, has re-invented modern poetry. A poet, an essayist, and a critic, Sheshadri, who came to America from Bengaluru (India) at the age of five, had his initial training in the form of his desire and the struggle for assimilation into the conformist American culture. At the age of 42, he became the new voice in American poetic circles when he published his first anthology of poems Wild Kingdom and went on to become a decorated writer of the current century. After receiving coveted fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Sheshadri became an editor at the New Yorker and, later, at Paris Review, while teaching at Sarah Lawrence College.